MOP Feedback: Healing Shrooms Revisited

I ran my first beta instance last night, which gave me the opportunity to test the Healing Shroom spell outside of Stormwind or solo leveling.

Healing Shrooms overall have gotten really mixed reviews. Some people really like the concept, and some people (I’m looking at you, Beru) really hate it.

The current problem: Dragonsoul’s mechanics have highlighted our need for a burst AOE heal. There are some times where stacking HOTs (and then holding your breath hoping it works) becomes a really ineffective strategy for healing 5-mans or raids. However, Blizzard doesn’t really want to just give us a copy of someone else’s healing spells (because that would further homogenize us). The solution implemented was to make our moonkin’s damage shrooms into healing shrooms. This is a really controversial spell, however, and some of the resto druid community would like to see healing shrooms thrown out and replaced with something else altogether. If anyone has ideas of what that “something else” could be, I’m all for hearing it. This post, however, is going to focus on how to improve the mechanics of what we have now.

How Healing shrooms work in beta: In this early stage of the development process, they work just like damage shrooms do, except that when you detonate, they heal people.

You place the little shroom on the ground, and then when you hit the “detonate” button, your little shrooms explode heal people. This healing is a burst direct heal.

You can place down up to 3 shrooms at a time before detonating. The detonate doesn’t require you to have all 3 shrooms down, so you can detonate a single shroom if you really want. However, in most cases, you may end up needing all 3 shrooms for maximum effectiveness.

Shrooms are on a 10 second cooldown, but they essentially require 3 GCDs to set up before you can detonate (detonate is off the GCD). NOTE:the Shroom placement GCD is 1 second, just like rejuv. This still means they cost you 3 rejuvs. This means that it really isn’t something we are going to want to use every 10 seconds in their current state because that leaves little time to do much of anything else.

Shroom Graphic Problems: Right now, in beta, shrooms still have the tiny targeting circle that balance druids have been using to target them. This circle is smaller than the size of the AOE healing radius, mostly because as DPS, you never needed to worry about the whole radius of the effect when setting up your shrooms (you could pretty safely put them on the tank who was tanking all the things you wanted to AOE). The shroom graphic is also pretty subtle because the original intent of damage shrooms was supposed to be that they were more like traps or bombs that you stepped on and didn’t see when used in PVP.

This method, however, doesn’t work for resto healing shrooms, where people need to know where to stand. Shrooms need the targeting circle to be as big as the healing effect is, an they need a ring indicating where the DPS/tank should stand to receive their heal. Since shrooms require a lot of setup time, the worst thing that could happen is for you to waste mana because people ran away from your shrooms or weren’t inside of their radius. So, shrooms need more obvious circles like all other ground-targeted heals have for other classes. For the time being, I’d be okay with them sharing the Efflorescence ground graphic if needed (that may actually be preferable, since we have trained our raiders to stand in the efflorescence circle instead of running out of it, LOL).

Shroom Mechanic problems: So, the problem of re-purposing a pretty gimmicky damage spell for healing is that you can’t ever just copy that kind of damage spell, slap a heal on it, and call it a day. The graphic problem isn’t the only problem with the spell, though the graphics are easier to fix than mechanics. Now that Healing Shrooms and Damage Shrooms can basically be completely different spells due to the new specialization mechanics, there is absolutely no reason for their mechanics to need to be identical. They only needed to be the same if Healing Shrooms was just a talent we picked up that modified the existing spell. Since they can be different spells now, they should be different spells.

Shrooms need to activate the Harmony mastery. We need an AOE heal button that activates our mastery to use between Swiftmends, so that we don’t have to waste GCDs on single-target direct heals if we don’t want to. If we spend a lot of GCDs on dropping shrooms, it is likely that maintaining Harmony is going to be difficult or impossible if shrooms don’t activate harmony. Right now on beta, detonate isn’t activating my harmony buff. This should be a pretty easy fix.

A 6 yard radius for healing shrooms is too small, since you have a pretty high risk of someone moving out of range of the shrooms on pretty much any fight that isn’t stand-still. They should still have the same diminishing returns for AOE targets that all other ground-targeted AOE spells have. However, right now, it looks like shrooms in MoP Beta are healing for somewhere around 8 to 10 yards based on using the Efflorescence graphic & healing effect as a guide. They should have at least a 10 yard radius to be effective, since 6 is too small for a heal (10 is the radius of healing rain, so if you stuck a shroom in the middle of Healing Rain, it would hit everyone there when you bloomed). I’m okay with Wild Growth & rejuv still being the go-to buttons for when everyone is super spread out. However, a 10 yard range really should be the minimum for this kind of heal (with 15 to 20 yards probably being more ideal for reducing the risk of people moving out of them, especially if we drop down to only 1 or 2 shrooms instead of 3 – see below comments).

We need some sort of HOT component on application when dropping the shrooms. I think that healing shrooms should activate some sort of efflorescence effect when you set them down. That way, your mana isn’t totally wasted if people move out of the way before you could drop all 3 shrooms and bloom them. A HOT portion would help stabilize people until you got all your shrooms down, and would fit in line with druid’s mixing of HOT & direct heals, since Detonate would still be a big burst direct heal. There’s nothing worse than trying to set up a heal that you know you’ll need, and watching people die while you are still setting up your shrooms. The HOT duration would need to be short, however, to encourage us to still want to bloom (ie. maybe the HOT lasts for 3-6 seconds or something). That would reduce the risk level of using the spell, since no one else has to both place & detonate their heals (and it would let DPS know that they are in the right place).

Three shrooms feels like too many. I like the idea of being able to place multiple shrooms. However, resto druids are pretty GCD-locked right now, with having a bunch of HOTs and our mastery to actively maintain. Having to drop 3 shrooms on a 10 second cooldown is too much, because it will end up encouraging shroom-spamming (which won’t be fun for resto healers). Overall, I think we should reduce the number of shrooms down to 2 total for resto druids. This would keep the unique feeling of the spell, but reduce the burden on resto druid healers that the spell seems to be creating. Having 3 lifebloom stacks AND 3 shrooms is too much, because you could honestly spend all day just keeping up LB and shrooms, and shrooms weren’t meant to dominate our entire healing rotation. It could also be possible to put in a major glyph that increased the cooldown of shrooms to 30 seconds but allowed you to place one mega-shroom that dropped all 3 shrooms at the same time (OR just make this mega-shroom the baseline ability for all resto druids). If none of those options would work, then I’d suggest increasing the cooldown on shrooms to 15 or 20 seconds baseline to make them less problematic in our rotation (even moonkin would potentially benefit from a 15 sec cooldown on shrooms in MoP so that you could fit a Hurricane and set up your shrooms before they came off CD).

Another option would be to somehow remove the detonate (so, shrooms count down from X and then pop on their own?), however I like the idea of being able to control when the heal happens. I’m really not sure how shrooms would work without a detonate, but having to both place things on the ground AND detonate them seems to be the major sticking point for some shroom-haters. So, finding a way to remove the detonate could be a solution, so you can “set and forget” like other class’ AOE heals.

Shrooms could also work by casting “spores” on people, rather than the ground (so someone would carry their shroom spores with them when they moved, and you could detonate their spores when you wanted the heal to work. The spore mechanic would be better for PvP where people move around a lot more unpredictably than they do in PvE).

Conclusions:

I think there are a lot of options for making healing shrooms viable in our rotation. However, just slapping a heal on the damage version isn’t going to integrate very well into resto druids’ current healing style, where we are already mashing buttons every second just to try and keep up. I think there are ways to change Healing Shrooms to keep the idea alive, but they have to be their own spell (not just the moonkin version) for a healing shroom to work. If healing shrooms don’t work, the developers also need to be willing to basically completely scrap that concept and give us something that does work for better filling the current hole in our arsenal that is begging for a direct AOE heal.

39 comments on “MOP Feedback: Healing Shrooms Revisited”

I’m not entirely sure if Blizzard would be able to do this, but it could be kind of neat if the heal the shrooms did was based off of how many were down. So no matter what the 3 shrooms always hit for a combined heal of say 15k (just for an easy number). So if you put down 1 shroom, it would heal everyone in that location for 15k. or if you put 2 shrooms down in two different locations, it would heal each group for 7.5k (combined for 15k) or 3 locations for 5k (combined for 15k).

This would keep us from having to make sure we always place 3 shrooms in the same spot everytime just to get the max heal. Also not sure how useful it would be if people are that spread out and only get a 5k heal versus a 15k heal.

You pretty much touched base on every complaint I currently have with the spell. I had the same concerns about the spell before Beta.

I’m OK with dropping 3 shrooms as long as Blizzard rewards us for spending the GCDs and having them on standby. One of my ideas was to have the shrooms act like Healing Stream Totem or something similar while they were planted. This is so we are rewarded for planting them even tho we might not need to detonate them right away.

As you already stated the radius needs to be increased and the graphic needs changed. The targeting circle need to be fixed and a “spore aura” needs to encircle the shroom so raiders know where to stand in the radius of the spell. Also, like you already said, it would be awesome if they procced our Mastery.

At the end of the day (or beta as it were) we need a burst (direct healing) AoE spell in our toolkit. That spell should I think use the mushroom motif because there is a nice symmetry with the direct damage AoE balance spell. Beyond that I see no reason that anything about the healing shroom needs to correspond with the live balance spell.

Range: the range should be on par with the other direct healing AoE spells in the game Holy radiance is 10 yards so there is no reason that shrooms should not get 10 yards also.

Number of shrooms: To my way of thinking, there should be one and only one mushroom in play at a time. Healing is a game played at the raid-frame. forcing healers to interact with the game-space a little is good design (healing rain is kinda fun). Forcing healers to spend 3 GCDs in the game-space to set up a single heal risks turning off players (I suspect Beru would prefer to NEVER interact with the game-space). A single mushroom makes the spell feel like H-Rain, when the group is clumped up, and shroom is off CD, you place a shroom on the group > detonate it. Unlike healing rain though, a shroom can be placed ahead of time at a stack point, for instance and detonated when everyone arrives. This sounds fun to me.

Spores: I am as jealous of holy radiance as every other druid but that does not mean I want it added to my spellbook. Turning a raider into a giant mushroom (<-only way I'm on board) and exploding them for a direct heal is very similar to HR. the only distinctions are that HR has a hot attached, and shrooms requires a detonation.

Adding a HoT: I think this can be a good spell without adding a HoT to it. that stomps on efflorescence's territory in my opinion. plus if it the groups leaves the range of your shrooms before you detonate, it was a bad time/place to use the spell, you SHOULD be punished for bad decision. This is also completely mitigated by moving to a single mushroom since you could place and detonate with a single keystroke if you so please.

Remove the detonate: Once again, a single shroom solved this. You could macro detonate to your shroom button and drop a healy bomb OR you could place now and explode later. That's two great game-play elements from once spell! (<- read like shamwow guy)

The only issue with the spell that I have conceived of here is that an instant cast AoE direct heal would be rather powerful. There would need to be some tuning with the CD and possibly even a cast time added to make it fit right.

I like the spore idea a lot because wasting 3 gcd’s and 6000+ mana would really suck. I also don’t like making a shroom cast 1 second it devalues haste. What I would love to see as the mechanic is leave shrooms off the gcd but make the placement have a 3 sec cd, make it a spore mechanic, still have the 3 shroom limit, 10 yd range per, and have the detonate as a 2 sec cast. That to me would make the mechanic alot of fun for me and give it some different flavor. Having a cast time on the detonate makes haste more valuable. Keeping the placement off the gcd but adding a cd on it adds a bit of skill and actual rotation and a bit of a frenetic pace to keep us engaged during an encounter. Doing that would make druids the funnest healing class to play.
I love my druid but the healing play style is a bit stale it has not really changed since wrath. Adding the mastery was something I actually liked forcing us out of our spam rejuv and wildgrowth on cd was good. But having to cast swiftmend or regrowth on ooc procs or a nourish or a healing touch every 10 secs is not engaging enough. I would also like to add I hate the level 90 talents. Utility is fine but it isn’t fun and I see utility in those talents not fun flavor talents. I look at the pally talents and I think YUM!!!!!!! I look at ours and I think “where was those pally talents again?”

For the detonation case, you could always make the detonation triggerable by clicking on the mushroom like a lightwell.

That said I think the most important things are: reducing the difficulty in placing shrooms, and lowering the GCD cost.

The “Spore” idea or even just auto-targeting your target if you have one (and reverting to reticule mode if you don’t) would make shrooms much easier to deal with.

Also the vast majority of the spell usage will be “place 3 mushrooms in 1 spot, detonate”… very tedious. Why not just make placing mushrooms be a channeled spell like penance? That way we don’t need to target the same spot 3 times, and still allows us to cancel early in the rare case we only want a single shroom. Alternatively, give us 3 different spells to place 1, 2, or 3 mushrooms at once.

I like the idea of just having the single cast of mushroom placement, sprout 2 additional mushrooms in the same location over time. So you’d have the equivalent time it took to place three mushrooms, but only incur that initial GCD, after that initial shroom another another one would sprout automatically a GCD amount of time later, and then a third another GCD amount of time later (you could also adjust the times for further balance). You could add in a radius change along these lines where a two shroom burst has a larger radius than a 1 shroom burst and a 3 shroom burst even larger.

I know this would take away the ability to have 3 separate areas burst at the same time, but while I see many uses for wanting to just apply a little bit of damage in different areas at the same time, I’m not really seeing the equivalent need for healing 3 separate areas at a reduced rate at the same time that’s not already kinda covered by our current toolset.

I like this idea, It preserves the single game-space interaction that I proposed and prevents the hard to balance instant cast heal bombs. The question I have is would you need some sort of UI element to identify the current “ripeness” state of your shrooms? It seems simple but the first thing I thought was that I would need a shroom timing addon.

At first I was rather excited for healing shrooms, but when I saw them in action they felt rather lackluster. I agree that using 3 GCD is excessive, especially when we have our mastery to maintain as well as stacking lifebloom and blanketing rejuvs on the raid. I also feel like druids have the most limited healing toolkit when it comes to healing spells, and we do lack a AoE burst heal. While I have a great love for shrooms on live, I find them as a healing utility quite uninspired and clunky.

After Resto druids not receiving a new spell (well I guess Efflor was nice, but hardly a new innovative idea or new spell) I have attempted to think about new ways to resolve the lack of burst AoE healing while maintaining the druid flavor. In the end, I took the “Living Seed” talent and reworked it. As it is now, unless they tank heal (which I have not met a single druid who has been assigned to that role) not many druids take this talent, and I feel its just a terrible version of Divine Aegis. Another thing I missed was the longer HoT of pre-Cata Regrowth.

In my iteration of “Living Seed” was as follows:

Living Seed
40 yard range
1.5 sec cast

Plants a living seed on a friendly target, healing them every 5 seconds for 30 seconds. The amount healed is applied low at first, and increases reaches its full duration. The Living Seed will bloom when the target is next attacked, healing them for X (a different amount based on how long the seed has been on the target). Limit of 3 seeds.

The healing is small at first, but continues to grow as the seed “grows”. This will be a raid healing mechanic, as behind hit consumes the seed, but planting a seed on the tank, while sub-optimal, is an option. I sort of compare this ability to the Disc priest’s new Spirit Shell ability; a castable bubble. The idea behind that was that Disc priests enjoy “healing” with bubbles. I think druids should get a castable HoT with a longer duration since we enjoy healing with HoTs. Then there would be another ability like Detonate:

Flourish
Instant
10 sec cooldown

Instantly flourishes all Living Seeds planted by the druid, healing the target and all surrounding friendly targets for X.

This ability would consume the Living Seed, healing them for a set amount. I considering “healing for the remaining unhealed amount done by the HoT”, but I found that that could be somewhat overpowered in some circumstances.

Of course, this would trigger harmony. I feel that by adding a long HoT component will justify using the ability even if it is not planned to be bloomed. This also eliminates the clunky shroom placing system as well as the small range of the shrooms, because the seed is connected to a player, not the environment. Even if the seed’s bloom effect only hits that one person, it is not completely wasted, analogous to how Efflorescence is optimal with 3 people in it, but is acceptable as long as it heals at least 1 person.

/begin QQ

Let the boomkins keep their doom shrooms. I never even thought of mushrooms as a healing sort of thing anyways. Resto druids are overdue for a new ability, and to paraphrase Lissanna, taking Wild Mushroom and slapping a heal on it does not cut it.

With our talent tree (IMO) in complete disarray, and Paladins and Priests getting new spell after new spell, I sort of feel like druids are being somewhat forgotten.

Liss, you keep using the term detonate with healing shrooms, shouldn’t we be saying Bloom? afterall we bloom the mushrooms to heal.

There are some logistic issues to shrooms. I noticed they nerfed detonate for balance in co-efficient and initail damage, bad move, putting 3 shrooms up, whether to detonate or bloom costs GCD, and lives version of detonate just about makes it worth the 3 GCDs, however both detonate and bloom could benefit from other spells actually causing addiitonal mushrooms to grow.

Blooms: Regrowth and Swiftmend would be prime spells i would think could have the extra effect of causing an extra mushroom to grow at the target, so you can bloom at will

Detonates: Hurricane/Astral storm could grow extra mushrooms during channellinf thaat you can detonate later and insect swarm could return having one of its features to pollinate mushrooms causing one to grow near a target so you can detonate (it could also do other things like spread moonfire dots). That way again you just plant one and let your regrowth/insect swarm or hurricane/swiftemend produce extra while you bloom or detonate away.

What about a channel that lays each mushroom every X (I feel like 0.5-1 seconds would be reasonable) seconds? It could either bloom them at completion of the channel or bloom it separately as it is now.

This would reduce the time spent targeting and you could plan your next heal, where you will move etc. but at the same time would feel similar to the Balance version (could even make the Balance version work the same way)

Mushroom spores sticking to a friendly target for 10 to 15 seconds and healing that friendly target for a % of damage the friendly target does. What a brilliant way to heal through damage done. This is similar to the way radiant spores works as a.chloro mancer in rift.

I have always thought blizzard would only use one mushroom for this idea. Why, because of the global cooldown of placing 3. Like you said we’re already pushing all these buttons, having another spell that requires 3 gcds to be effective is rediculous. LB at least got a glyph for transfering the stacks, but i doubt we’re going to see a glyph that allows you to play 3 shrooms at one time.

Things that they could do to improve.
– Balance around one shroom placement. Maybe that would need a castime?
– Take off the GCD and let you free click 3 times without having to select the spell again. This way you can quickly place the shrooms, and hopefully not feel GCD capped.
– like you said increase the range, its an explosion, not a fire cracker.
– change it into a grenade type spell. Activate mushroom grenades for 3 charges. last 10 seconds with a 15 second cooldown. That actually sounds kinda fun 😡

A possible idea would be mixing them in as a sort of basic mastery..you can kinda say totemish if you want. Place the 3 up, but your next Wild Growth or a few, have like 5-10% more healing boost, or on a per basis.

Blizz can also mess around with placing one mushroom, but having them spread into the three that you can use. Maybe on a per damage basis or make it a sort of thing if you hit the target with the Mushroom or enough people around said mushroom with Wild Growth, the spores latch onto said people and detonate with the detonate button or after so much damage.
There’s alot of potential to have a pretty neat and possibly really unique Druid spell, just hope they implement it right.

I have never liked the Mushroom spell that requires the placement then detonation since just starting a fight would require 3x lifebloom and 3x shrooms, and having ppl to stand in it when it is detonated and if they didn’t then you wasted 3 gcds. I would rather have something like moss placed on people that mitigate dmg or something, say you place it on one person and it slowly grows out after so many seconds and then activates but that won’t help with our lacking in burst healing. I’m not very creative to think up anything to replace or improve on the shrooms.

Most people will take the path of least resistance and having to use so many gcds for one spell, I can’t see it being used more than once a fight. Which would be a shame because it would be our only new spell for healing for ages.

“I have never liked the Mushroom spell that requires the placement then detonation since just starting a fight would require 3x lifebloom and 3x shrooms”
Yup I mentioned that at the start. Placing 3x shrooms and 3x Lifebloom is a lot of preparation and I can’t think of any other class that would need to do use 6 gcd’s before a fight even starts.

Just one thing, Make our Mastery a passive one!
We have way to many stuff to watch.
Hope they come up with a good solution for the shrooms.
Loved the feedback you wrote, hope this makes a difference in what blizzard is going to do with our spells.

Why not make the healing mushroom into something like the “Unstable Mushroom” used by the Fungal Giants in the Zangarmarshes. You place the shroom (with a cast time) at a specific spot, the shroom grows and blooms after x seconds (x significantly greater then cast time ) to heal people in range. As a mater of fact this mechanic could also be used for balance.

One of the saddest parts of switching from boomkin to feral from 4.1 to 4.2 was that i lost the epic, difficult, and awesome aoe rotation and got it replaced with swipe swipe swipe swipe.

Shrooms are the best thing since baked bread, and I love the idea of healing shrooms.

Honestly I am not wild of your arguments here. Shrooms should activate mastery! That i agree on (on detonate). But I really dislike the hot notion, and recognize that there are serious pvp implications of that that would make detonating them all but impossible, and that is a bad idea.

I would be intrigued by a channel (ala penance) on the placement – the point being to allow you to place all 3 on one cast – but only if it was an option (and I am not sure how that would work out – it seems weird to an extent).

As long as shrooms are not grossly inefficient mana wise (which will be balanced out later in beta) – I see them as good right now. I don’t find myself desperately needing burst healing too often, and while I want a way to deal with fight mechanics like that, I am ok with shrooms being a spell that is used only for select circumstances and isn’t a core mechanic.

that’s why the HOT I suggested had a time duration so that while the shrooms can stay up for 5 mins, the HOT portion would be relatively short duration. So, after the HOT expired, there was no reason to leave the shrooms on the ground & detonating them (which costs no mana and you can control) becomes then an important part of getting them removed before you place new ones, rather than wasting the bloom on them. That would be especially true of the HOT portion didn’t stack up to 3 times like Lifebloom does.

Wild Growth, Rejuv, & Lifebloom should all be better HOTs than a shroom HOT would be. It’s possible to balance it such that a HOT portion is worthwhile but not overpowering.

personally i think the whole use of the mushroom idea should be scrapped its good in concept but horrible in application personally i think typhoon would have been a better spell to turn into a heal as it would still be a staple druid spell but its simple to use just face group and press button 1 gcd thats it and if you leave the pushback effect in for players you could also have some fun with your raid group =p

Good idea Sonny, i think mushrooms do need some additional mechanism that can generate additional mushrooms after you’ve placed one. I think you shoudl still be able to place up to 3 for strategic purpses, and an auto/ability generated mushroom will never overwrite a placed mushroom.. but yeah, some mechanims wiold really help.

Regrowth – well it regrows no? would be a good choice to generate an extra mushroom in a spell.
Wild Growth – it is a growth right? and a wild one at that? it should be able to grow wild mushrooms
Hurricane/Astral storm – well it waters right? if you water a plant it grows, this spell should also cause additional mushrooms to grow and will help.
Insect Swarm – though not there atm, this could easily come back to the balance druid with a different function. Insects pollinate plants so more grow right? well one of the things IS could do would be to auto grow mushrooms through pollination. Insects also spread effects, so they could spread DoTs and debuffs too rather than dodamge or make targets take 25% more damge.

So for single targets:
Regrowth & Insect Swarm would be great to be able to generate additional mushrooms on the targets they affect

For AoE
Wild Growth and Hurricane/Storm would agian be ideal fo also causing extra shrooms to grow.

and remember, a mushroom generated by abilities like regrowth/IS or WG/Hurricane would never override placed mushrooms.

I think the first thing we need to consider is how, when, and why we would use/need such a spell.

I’m thinking because we lack a spammable cast-time direct heal, we would need this for burst aoe damage periods, which makes sense. HoT healing has never been strong for burst damage.

So if we consider the need to burst aoe heal, then dropping mushrooms for a large aoe burst heal seems like a great idea, on paper. But in practical application, we face the problem of using WAY too many GCDs placing them where we could either waste time pre-planting or waste time post-damage planting and watch people die in either scenario.

I think the solution is simple: give us a way to drop all three at once. I can’t imagine we’d ever need to spread out mushrooms in such a way that would encourage the need of a single drop ability. If anything we’ll need to place them all at once in one area to bloom them and heal a group of people. I personally wouldn’t waste a bloom on a single mushroom, or even two. Just let me drop them all at once and have the ability to control when they detonate.

I think the first response to this would be “what about those times where we are too spread out due to some fight strategy or mechanic?” and I would answer that if that were the case, then mushroom laying and blooming is the least of our problems and we certainly have other spells that we currently use that would make more sense than fartin’ out some mushrooms. The point is, there are plenty of times where we are grouped up that something like an aoe heal from a detonated mushroom would be beneficial and as such, we’d need a way to get them all down as quickly as possible. A single 3-drop ability would make most sense.

I love the spore idea. While my main is a resto druid, I spend a lot of time healing on my disc priest, so I have a decent amount of experience with placement of barrier. While using that as a 3 min cool down is fine, having to place mushrooms continuously in different areas while spreading hots, keeping up lifebloom, and deal with our harmony mastery sounds painful at best. As you stated, we are already near gcd locked and using over 3 seconds for a heal that can easily miss does not sound appealing at all.

It may have been said
Why not just make living seed effect actually proc more and then detonate them all.
A cross between earthliving(shammy)hot and living seed(direct heal) somehow (passively applyied) With a 20% or more/less burst heal if you choose to detonate.

Like the main post a spore. So it can proc from any critical and apply spore, its a hot for a fixed amount(earthliving) for whatever secounds but if struck it instablooms like living seed for x amount left on its target. However if you detonate(bloom) manualy(highier mana than sm) it does an aoe burst heal with 4yards radias on any target with the spore for higher amt than a single target instabloom. So you could any were from 10 to 1 (10m) with spore and detonate.
It would suck at times to lose all spores(hot fell off/instabloom) if you waited to long to det but you could det right before or after mass aoe dmg. The good thing if the spored where to take aoe dmg they still get the instant single target bloom.
Sounds complicated but much better than having to manage placing shrooms bc its all pasive but for detonate. And all managable within our mastery constraint and (no need for it to activate our mastery)And lb juggling.
So our mastery is up and we need to choose a direct heal, rejuv, bloom(detonate), or sm gcd. which is the right tool for the dmg intake?

I like Starfury’s idea. It would be super sweet if our other spells could place mushrooms on the ground around were the people we heal were standing when they were healed.

The current place mushroom could still give us control over X peaceable mushrooms in addition to the passively placed ones either through a channel or the boomkin way and I don’t know about you guys but I’d feel much better about hitting detonate even if all I ever looked at was the frame if my rejuvenate put aoe healing mushrooms down for me.